Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/105

 the transformation of the separate capitalist establishments into social institutions. This transformation is being prepared for by the circumstance that the personality of the capitalist is steadily becoming more and more superfluous in the present mechanism of production. In the second place, it requires that all the establishments requisite for the satisfaction of the wants of the commonwealth be united into one large concern. How economic development is preparing the way for this by the steady concentration of capitalist concerns, has been explained in the foregoing chapter.

What must be the size of such a self-sufficing commonwealth? As the socialist republic is not an arbitrary creation of the brain, but a necessary product of economic development, the size of such a commanwealth cannot be predetermined. It must conform to the stage of social development out of which it grows. The higher the development that has been reached, the greater the division of labor that has been perfected, the more intercourse has developed between the producers—the larger will be the size of the commonwealth.

It is now nearly two hundred years since a well-meaning Englishman, John Bellers, submitted to the English Parliament a plan to end the misery which even then the capitalist system, young as it was, was spreading through the land. He proposed the establishment of communities that should produce everything that they needed, industrial as well as agricultural products. According to his plan, each